The present invention relates to records management systems, and more particularly to records declaration without sufficient information to classify the record for disposition.
Businesses and other organizations produce and receive large amounts of documents. These documents pertain to many different kinds of information and originate from numerous sources, both internal to the organization and from external sources. Quite often these documents meet the criteria of being a record. A record contains evidence of the business' or organization's activity and allows the organization to track activity and provide proof of activity for commercial, legal, and other purposes. Records are maintained according to records policies. A record policy indicates, for example, how a record is to be used, who can access a record, who can modify a record, when a record is ready for storage, security classification, retention schedules, and where a record must be kept, as well as destruction criteria.
The process of identifying records among the documents in an organization varies. A document gains record status by being “declared” as a record. Some documents are records upon being created, other documents may exist in the organization for an indefinite time until they gain sufficient information or usage that they can be declared and classified as a record. A document is conventionally declared when it can be classified according to an organization's file plan. A file plan includes a collection of records policies that allow the records management system to classify a given document into a record classification. Some documents are classified as records upon creation, such as email. Other documents become records due to being received from outside the organization in the course of the organization's activities, such as purchase orders, invoices, statements, utility bills, legal documents, and so on.
The conventional approach to records declaration, which requires a document to meet a records classification criteria prior to being declared a record, prevents some documents from being declared records that an organization might desire to treat as records, because the documents are not classifiable to a particular record class. Therefore there is a need for a record management system that allows a record to be declared without having to classify the record upon declaration.